


let the past find me here

by thatdarkhairedgirl



Series: my feet will want to find you wherever you lie sleeping (but i will stay alive) [3]
Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Future Fic, Gen, Recovery, Spoilers for "The Testaments" (Atwood Novel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:09:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22883053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdarkhairedgirl/pseuds/thatdarkhairedgirl
Summary: Agnes is not Hannah, but Hannah is Agnes.Luke and his daughters, sometime in the future.
Relationships: Luke Bankole/June Osborne | Offred
Series: my feet will want to find you wherever you lie sleeping (but i will stay alive) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639411
Comments: 2
Kudos: 35





	let the past find me here

> _Sometimes I wondered what my own father might have felt about me. I had some notions about my mother – she’d run away with me, she’d been turned into a Handmaid by the Aunts – but none at all about my father. I must have had one, everyone did. You’d think I’d have filled up the blank with idealized pictures of him, but I didn’t: the blank remained blank._
> 
> – Margaret Atwood, _The Testaments_

> _I think of you, I haven't slept  
>  I think I do, but I don't forget  
>  My body moves, goes where I will  
>  But though I try, my heart stays still  
>  It never moves, just won't be led_
> 
> _And so my mouth waters, to be fed  
>  And you're always in my head  
>  You’re always in my head_
> 
> – Coldplay, _Always In My Head_

There are two photographs that Luke Bankole carries in his wallet, in his second life in Canada: one of him and June and Hannah, the old favorite, the three of them piled together for a selfie at the shore, the sun falling fast over the water behind them, the sky shot through with orange and pink in the light of the sunset. There were other photos that he took, that he loved, but it’s the last one he had of all three of them; the last one they took when his family was whole.

And one of him and Holly Nichole, sitting on the couch in his first apartment in Little America. It was a happy accident, this photo, taken as an afterthought: Holly, her pale, pudgy baby face staring confusedly at the camera, Luke smiling as he holds her up under her armpits so that she’s balanced between his knees, showing off the fact that despite everything else about them, they still matched: the both of them clad in black pants and a white t-shirt, both wearing the same pair of bright green socks. He has others of Holly that he loves – her first day of school, getting ice cream with Moira, doing homework with Erin at the kitchen table – but this is the one that he always thinks of, the photograph that he favors when strangers ask him if he has any children.

Whenever he thinks, _my daughter_ , it’s a flip of the coin which face comes to him first.

**…**

The night they get Holly back from Gilead is all a blur: Luke and Moira barreling through the Campobello hospital hallways like bulls let loose in a china shop, bumping into supply carts and nearly knocking over nurses in their haste to get to Holly’s room; their Mayday contacts, Holly’s handlers, struggling to hold them back, keep them calm; Holly, pale and wan and clearly exhausted, maybe just a little drugged, propped up in the narrow hospital bed like a doll, scratching blankly at the tape around the IV tube pinned into her swollen left arm. She looks so _small_ , sitting alone in the spotlight halo of the overhead lights; Luke is already near tears when he sees her, and can’t help but start to cry when he and Moira push through the door and into the room, when his daughter’s face lights up at the sight of them.

“ _Holly_ ,” he chokes out, smoothing his hand over her light brown hair, still tinged faintly green at the roots where the dye from her street kid disguise didn’t quite fade out completely. Moira is saying something in the background but it’s all white noise to him; Luke’s entire focus has narrowed down to Holly’s heart-shaped face, her dark eyes, the way she laughs when he hugs her to him. “Holly, kiddo, I _can’t_ – are you – they said you were –”

“ _Dad_ ,” Holly says on a laugh, pulling back so that she can look at him properly, her palms warm on the sides of his face. She’s teary-eyed but her tone is still sarcastic; under the slight morphine fog she’s still the girl he knows. “Dad, I’m _fine_ ,” she insists, “My arm’s busted, not my brain,” and Luke ducks forward so that their foreheads are pressed together, tubes and wires digging into his chest when he gathers her up in his arms again, when he holds her as tight as he can.

“You _had_ to make an entrance, didn’t you?” Moira says, deceptively calm and casual, and Holly snorts and reaches out to pull her godmother down to the bed, the three of them gathered tight together like the strands of a braid.

“You’re all over the news,” Luke says when they finally separate, “Someone leaked it to the CBC, they’ve been talking about the microdot documents all day –”

“And almost drowning wasn’t part of the plan,” Moira cuts in, “Your contact was supposed to take you all the way to the harbor.”

Holly rolls her eyes at that, and Luke and Moira share a fond look over her head. “It’s fine,” she says, “It worked out in the end. My sister saved me,” and for the first time, Luke realizes that there is someone else here with them.

The whole room is spinning; Luke shifts and rises from Holly’s bed, and there, sitting in a chair in the corner with her knees tucked underneath her, is a young woman in her early twenties. She’s been quiet this whole time, pulling a styrofoam cup apart while everyone fussed over Holly, the staticky remnants of it clinging to the denim of her jeans, to the front of her secondhand sweatshirt, neon green and cheap, commemorating a marathon from two years ago. _Run for Our Life, Help Fight Liver Cancer_ is stenciled in hot pink lettering across the front, jagged and bright, and Luke suddenly feels like he is going to black out – if _that’s_ Holly’s sister – if it’s – then that means –

“Praise be,” is all Hannah says, and Luke’s knees buckle beneath him.

**…**

It’s been a year since he’s seen her: a year since Holly learned the deeper truth of the circumstances surrounding her birth; since she joined Mayday and had to go to ground; since she’d agreed to infiltrate Gilead as a false convert with their missionaries, planning to smuggle documents back into Canada on her return. It’s been a year of constant worry, _where’s Holly? where’s Holly? where’s Holly?_ running underneath his thoughts in a constant, electric hum.

It occurs to him, later, when the shock has worn off, that when Holly went underground, it was the first time in years that the fear had changed. For seventeen years, _where’s Hannah?_ had been the phrase that stretched across his thoughts in an infinite, repeating loop, rolling like a news ticker all across his brain.

Luke does not want to think about what that might mean.

**…**

Agnes Mackenzie, Aunt Victoria, Hannah Bankole – his oldest daughter has lots of names to choose from, but asks to be called “Agnes” when she’s set down for her interviews with the Canadian top brass and American officials, with Mayday’s higher-ups. Moira’s mouth twists in a grimace when he comments on this, the two of them watching the conversation through the mirrored glass of the American Consulate’s interrogation room.

“Can you blame her?” Moira asks, pouring them both another cup of terrible coffee. “It’s the one she had the longest.”

Luke shakes his head and stirs more sugar into his paper cup, leaning on an elbow against the tabletop while he drinks. _Agnes_ is not Hannah, but Hannah _is_ Agnes; right now, for Luke, it’s still a hard distinction to make.

Agnes is twenty-three and clearly terrified; everything about her, from her movements to her posture to the expression on her face, is tight and too-controlled, an attempt at coming across as confident and on the level, despite the occasional tremor in her voice. They’ve given her new clothes for the interview, and she is dressed modestly for the occasion: long sleeves and a high neckline, a broomstick skirt long enough to brush the linoleum floor. Her dark hair is uncovered but long, pulled back in a severe braid, away from her face.

When she was a baby, they thought that Hannah was a bit of a mutt – an imperfect mix of both him and June, favoring neither, completely herself. Now, watching through the window, it is easier to see her mother in their daughter as she talks: June’s wide-set eyes glancing between the interviewer and the closed door, June’s nose, the heart-shaped bow of her mouth. He says as such to Moira, the two of them trying to follow the thread of the story coming through the speakerphone: trying to process _poison_ and _Pearl Girls_ and _particicution_ , the assault she’d faced at the hands of her dentist making his stomach turn. Moira shakes her head.

“She looks like Aunt Lydia,” she tells him, chewing on a thumbnail before she adds, “Under that, she looks more like you.”

**…**

June comes and goes through their lives like a ghost, slipping into the hospital after visiting hours are officially over and meeting with her daughters in secret. Luke knows this because Holly tells him about it the next day, Luke sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair at her bedside while Holly picks uninterestedly at the lunch a nurse brought her.

“She had to go,” Holly says, poking experimentally at a plastic cup of fruit cocktail with a spork. “Mayday said so. She told us she loved us, and was proud of us, but she had to finish her mission.”

“How did Agnes take it?” he asks. Agnes is gone from their shared hospital room, off in the chapel with Moira for her afternoon prayers. _You can take the girl out of Gilead_ , Moira had joked before they left, but was met only with a blank look from Agnes that made Luke and Holly, both seated behind her, share a silent, guilty laugh.

Holly shrugs. “She can be hard to read, sometimes. I think it’s bugging her more than she’s saying, though.”

“This is a lot for her,” Luke says with a nod. “The culture shock alone is probably really hard for her to process, even before getting into all the stuff with your mom. We’ve got to be there for her, Holl, and be really understanding of what she’s going through, even when it’s hard.”

“You sound like a therapist,” Holly says with a smirk.

Luke steals a pear slice from her fruit cup. “I’ve been talking with a good one.”

“Is it…” Holly turns her face away for a moment, looking through the open window at the parking lot below. “Is it _weird_ , that I’m relieved she left? My mom? Like, I don’t have to worry about disappointing her if she sticks around, or get into all the bullshit about my bio-dad?”

“Language,” Luke warns, not really feeling it. “And it’s not weird, not weird at all.”

“I just thought… I thought I’d be _happier_ about it, you know? I thought seeing her in person would be like, just… _I don’t know_ , like I’d have this piece of me that’s been missing snapped back into place, and I didn’t - it felt _underwhelming_. I thought it would be, just - just _more_ than what it was, you know?”

“It’s a process, Holly.” Luke stops for a moment, trying to think of the phrasing his therapist used. “But you’ve got to know it’s not a _set process_. There’s no right way to feel about reuniting with your mom, or about how you want to get into the stuff about your birth dad. You’ve been through so much, honey; you don’t have to decide what you want to do right this second. When all of this is over, we can figure out what we want from each other, together.”

Holly sniffles and Luke leans forward, dabbing at her eyes with the paper napkin from her meal tray. Her expression shifts, half embarrassment, half acceptance, as he tells her, “You’re a whole person, Holly, with or without her.”

She laughs at that, teary and short, and pulls him in for a hug. “Do you miss her?” she asks as they part, and Luke gives Holly a small, sad smile as he moves away.

Of course he misses her. She was his _wife_. He’s dated, off and on, in the intervening years since June went even deeper underground: Sara, the mom of one of Holly’s friends; Melanie, whom he’d met through Mayday; Marjane, a fellow refugee he’d met at a protest, she’d lasted the longest, but it still never felt quite right. There was an old line, years and years ago, back in the days before Gilead, about how you only got one big love in the course of your life – maybe two, if you were lucky. For him it was June, it was _always_ June: June, whom he’d thrown his entire life upside-down for; June, who understood him in a way that no one else ever had; June, who made him want to be a better husband, a better father, a better _man_.

“I do,” he settles on telling her, “But it hasn’t been all bad. I got you out of it.”

“I feel like I got the better end of that deal, though,” Holly says, voice still a little thick with emotion. “I got a house and a dad and three square meals a day for seventeen years. You spent all that money on me when you could have, like, traded me in the first week for an iPod, or something.”

Luke kisses the top of her head, and then steals the last peach cube from Holly’s fruit cup. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know we’re a Spotify house.”

**…**

The day the President addresses the nation is the same day Holly and Agnes are officially discharged from the hospital. Across the province, the country, the _world_ , people are watching the truth of Gilead’s unbridled corruption unfold in full, technicolor detail; in Luke’s suburban townhouse, the lot of them keep the TV and the radio off, their phone notifications on ‘silent,’ eating Chinese takeout around the kitchen table like it is a normal Thursday evening, like it is just another day. And it feels good, Luke thinks later, clearing their dinner dishes with Moira and Agnes, Holly falling asleep at the table – it feels wonderfully, blessedly _normal_ in a way that things haven’t in a long time, not since Mayday took Holly into their fold, maybe not even since he and June and –

Hannah hands him a plate and Luke shakes the thought away. Agnes, it’s _Agnes_ , not Hannah, not anymore. He has to keep reminding himself to use the name she prefers.

“Go to bed, Holly,” Moira says after a bit, poking the nodding Holly in the back of the neck so that she jerks forward, head rising up like a periscope from the sanctuary of her folded arms.

“I’m not _tired_ ,” she pouts, swiping a bit of drool away from her mouth. Luke laughs to himself as he finishes drying the dishes, thinking of Holly at three, of Hannah at four, the fights they both put up to stay awake just a _little_ longer, to be a part of the action just a little bit more.

“Go upstairs, then,” he tells her, pointing Agnes toward the cabinet their glasses should go in. “You don’t have to sleep, but you’ll be more comfortable in your bed than down here.”

Holly rolls her eyes and swings her legs around the side of her chair, dragging her feet as she moves to hug Moira, then Agnes, then him, before slouching away up the stairs. Agnes is watching them cautiously; he thought it was out of jealousy, at first, each time Luke has caught her watching him hugging Holly, or touching her arm, or tugging affectionately on her hair. It took him a moment before he realized that it wasn’t jealousy in her eyes, or even concern for Holly’s well-being - no, it was curiosity, genuine _curiosity_ , at how easily physical affection came to them, how they both could reach out without any reserve and let the other know they cared. He thinks back now, as Agnes wanders from the kitchen and into the small living room, to the interview she gave at the Consulate; the tenderness in how she talked about her adoptive mother, the denial of that type of loving touch as soon as Tabitha Mackenzie passed away. It makes him sad, to think of Hannah – his bright, happy Hannah – left alone like that, wilting in the absence of love.

Luke shuts off the kitchen faucet and dries his hands. The thump of Holly’s footsteps echo through the ceiling, and Moira goes upstairs to say her goodbyes. The guest room is usually reserved for her on nights like this, but he’s since straightened it up to be more of a real bedroom than a temporary way station for Moira or Mayday operatives. Luke has told Agnes that there is a space for her in this house for however long she wants it, until she decides what she wants to do, where she wants to go. She’s a legal adult, and if she wants her independence there are options for her; if she doesn’t want to stay with Luke, if she wants to collaborate more with the government, or with Mayday, he will support her however she needs him to. It’s her first night in his house since they’ve been back – if she wants it to be the only one, he’ll understand.

As it is, Agnes still seems to be getting her bearings around the townhouse; Luke watches from the empty kitchen as Agnes examines the tchotchkes on the fake fireplace’s mantle, the books on the shelves. She catches herself on the wall of photographs and Luke follows the line of her eyes from picture to picture, mapping the way she moves from frame to frame. Luke has next to nothing left from his life before: no wife, no wedding ring, just some old Facebook photos he’d requested from the American Digital Archive Project when Holly was in elementary school, blown up and printed and hanging on the wall, the handful that survived Gilead’s technological purge now drowned out by snapshots of Holly at different ages, his life in Toronto, Emily and Sylvia’s wedding. June’s Gileadean ‘wanted’ poster, framed and hung to the side. Agnes stops for a moment at that one, her expression soft, considering.

It’s the rabbit, though, that makes her pause; Hannah’s stuffed rabbit, the fur worn and mangy with love from his first daughter, from his second, sitting on the bookshelf in the living room. Agnes stops when she sees it, brown eyes big as dinner plates, and Luke watches as she reaches out with a trembling hand and strokes her fingers over one of the matted velvet ears. How often did she drag that thing around as a baby? Luke thinks back to newborn Hannah in her crib, drooling on it in her sleep, two-year-old Hannah sick and snuggled up with him on the couch, the rabbit clutched tight under her chin while she burrowed into his side, an old Bugs Bunny cartoon flickering on the TV screen. It was the worst kind of déjà-vu when Holly came into his life, when he walked through those same steps with her that he’d done with Hannah, right down to the same stuffed toy.

 _You’re not replacing her_ , his therapist at the time had told him. _You can’t exchange one child for another._

“You called him Thumper,” he says, and Agnes, surprised at the sound of his voice, turns so quickly that her long skirt fans out in a dark whorl around her, and Luke is afraid she might somehow unbalance herself and fall over. “Like the - what’s it, the rabbit in the movie, _Bambi._ You used to love _Bambi_ , basically broke the DVD watching it when you were little.”

Agnes ducks her head, averts her gaze, like she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t. Agnes is still nervous around them all; around Luke, especially, she’s as skittish as a beaten dog, quiet and guarded. Luke remembers what the therapist told him, how young women in Gilead aren’t allowed to be alone with men, sometimes even in the privacy of their homes, and takes a step back, giving her space.

“I don’t –” Agnes shakes her head, wringing her hands together. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”

Something sinks in his chest, a sense of disappointment he didn’t even realize he’d been afraid of feeling. Luke nods apologetically and lets the conversation end, moving to take the trash out to the bins by the garage, when Agnes blurts out, “What else?”

Luke stops in the doorway, a hand on the wall. “What else?”

“What else did I – did I _like?_ ”

He turns back to face her and Agnes frowns at her hands before looking up, her face as blank as a fresh sheet of paper. Agnes has lived an entire lifetime in the time between when he’d lost her and when he found her again; Luke has held tight to the five-year-old version of his daughter inside his heart for years, afraid to let go, afraid to lose whatever pieces of her he still had. All the little things he’s carried, with nowhere to set them down, finally have a place where they can rest. He tells her, without stopping: chocolate chip pancakes were her favorite Sunday breakfast; she loved _Bambi_ and _Fantasia_ and was the only girl in her kindergarten class who didn’t like _Frozen_ ; her favorite colors were yellow and purple; she liked their cats but loved dogs more, even though she was so allergic just looking at their neighbor’s Westie set her sneezing.

“You used to love going on the swings, too,” he adds, and she did, she _did_ , she loved that stupid rusting deathtrap more than anything else on the playground by their old apartment in Brighton. Hannah was never afraid of heights, not afraid to spin faster and faster on the carousel, or to climb to the highest point of the jungle gym and jump straight off. It used to drive him crazy; he was always afraid Hannah would hurt herself when he wasn’t looking, that she’d break her arm somehow, or crack her head open leaping off the swings. June would encourage it, sometimes, a wry smile tugging at the corners of her mouth when she told him, _she’s not made of glass, you know._

Agnes lets her hands drop to her sides. “I… I wasn’t allowed on swingsets, as a child,” she says.

“Why?” he asks, and Agnes only shrugs.

“It wasn’t proper for a young lady to play on them. Our skirts might fly up, and our caretakers worried for our safety. One never knew what could drive men to lustful thoughts, and it was best to remove the temptation entirely.”

Luke doesn’t know what to say to that, or at least, nothing that would be polite to say in his present company. Agnes regards him steadily, as if anticipating his next move, and it’s like a light switches on somewhere inside his head, inspiration striking as quick and neat as lightning.

“They didn’t let you on the swings, huh?” Agnes shakes her head, and Luke gives her a slow, clever smile, hooking a thumb over his shoulder toward the front door. “Get your boots on, then. Let’s take a walk.”

**…**

Holly knew that Luke wasn’t her biological father even before the full truth came out in her teens; a black man, a white child, even in this day and age it wasn’t something that could easily be accepted.

Holly didn’t question it until around first grade, after he and Moira came to a parents’ night at her school. She’d come home in tears the next day, running off the bus and right past him to her bedroom, where she flung herself dramatically across her bedspread and cried so hard he thought she was going to choke. Erin couldn’t get her to stop and even Moira couldn’t calm her down; it was Luke, drowning in a sea of pink, sitting on the floor with a sobbing Holly in his lap, who managed to get the story out of her, who managed to help her settle back into herself.

It was one of her terrible little classmates who said it, the racist little snot: she’d overheard it from _her_ parents, and told Holly that Luke wasn’t her real father, that she was adopted and horrible and unloved. “Claudia says you’re stuck with me because my _real_ parents are in Gilead,” Holly had told him once the wailing had finally stopped, tearfully hiccupping her way through the words, “ _She_ said you don’t _really_ want me, you just get money from the prime minister to take care of me, and – and one day you’re _gonna send me back_ , ‘cause the government’s gonna tell you to.”

“That’s not true, kiddo,” he’d said, and Holly shook her head, her face crumpling.

“It _is!_ She said my _real_ daddy is probably a _criminal_ , and my mom had to be a – a _slut_ , because only _sluts_ have kids with more than one person, and only _bad_ people stayed in Gilead, so that means _I’m_ gonna be bad, too, and _that_ means –” she squeezed her eyes shut, like it physically hurt her to say it, “That means _you don’t love me_ , ‘cause I’m _bad like her_ , and _I’m not your real kid_.”

Luke sighed. “Claudia doesn’t know anything about _anything_ , honey. Your mommy –” he stopped, glancing to where Moira and Erin hovered nervously in the doorway. Moira nodded, and Luke brushed Holly’s hair behind her ears. “Your mommy and I used to be married, and we had your big sister, and we got separated before you were born. We loved each other a lot, but we both thought the other was gone forever, and she met your birth dad before she found out I was still alive. Your mommy did everything she could to get you out of Gilead, and she sent you to me so I could take care of you, because she trusted me and Aunt Moira to keep you safe until she could save Hannah, and come home and take care of you herself.”

Holly’s lip trembled, and Luke kissed her forehead. “Your mommy loves you _so much_ , Holly, that’s why she sent you to me. Because she knew I’d love you, too.”

“But _why?_ ” she’d asked, in a voice so miserable that it broke his heart to hear it. “ _Why_ do you love me, if I’m not yours?”

“Because you’re my girl,” he told her, rubbing soothing circles over her back, and Holly sniffled and buried her head in his chest. “You’re my girl, sweetheart, and nothing anybody says is ever going to change that.”

**…**

He doesn’t tell her where they’re going, not at first: Luke gives her Holly’s extra coat and Agnes follows him warily down the empty suburban street, bundled in her borrowed parka with her arms crossed over her chest to stave off the chill. The hem of her long skirt drags through the light dusting of snow on the ground, her footprints bracketed by the serpentine pattern it leaves behind.

“We shouldn’t be out here,” she says, “It’s not safe to be out after dark,” and Luke bites his tongue to keep himself from saying something he’ll regret. _A woman walks home alone at night_ , he thinks bitterly, reminding himself of the old adages, the warnings they still give women of what not to do, _A woman walks into a bar, a woman takes public transportation. A woman has any control over her own bodily autonomy._

“It’s fine,” he tells her, and gestures with an ungloved hand to the playground up ahead. It’s a quick walk from the house, built into the grassy center island of their cul-de-sac, set at such an angle that Luke doesn’t even need to strain his neck to see their house sitting back at the corner of the street. He can even see the light still on in Holly’s bedroom: a warm yellow glow in the dark, a winking eye set into the Picasso-esque face of their townhouse’s façade.

Agnes’s expression is hard to read: there’s apprehension there, but fascination, too. Interest. Luke leads her forward through the playground, the only light coming from the streetlamps posted through the neighborhood, strange shadows cutting through their orange glow from the monkey bars, the see-saw, the high point of the slide. Luke stops at the swingset and pulls one back by its chain, the thick rubber seat bouncing back against his knees as he does.

“You’ve never been on a swing?” he says, “Well, now’s your chance.”

Agnes presses her lips together into a thin, worried line, her eyebrows furrowed skeptically in a way that reminds him of June, of Holly. “It’s not kind to joke in such a way.”

“It’s not a joke. If you’re worried about other people watching you, there’s no one around but you and me. There’s no better time to try it.” Luke rattles the chain in what he hopes is an enticing way. “Hop on. I’ll push you.”

Agnes sets her jaw, looking like she is warring with herself – be out alone with a strange man, or go home; make a choice for yourself, or don’t. Take the risk, or not. Agnes takes the offered swing and sets herself gingerly onto the seat, as if testing her weight. “What do I do?”

“I’ll pull you back,” he says, “All you’ve got to do is keep your legs straight when you go forward, then bring them back in on the return. I’ll push you for as long as you need it, okay? Just let me know when you’re ready.”

Agnes settles herself, gripping her hands around the cold chains, and with a short nod Luke pushes her forward, his hands pressing lightly against the middle of her back. Agnes moves like a pendulum, kicking her legs out forward and back, forward and back, the swingset creaking with every motion. She’s quiet as she does it, her face fixed into a look of pure concentration, her body moving steadily into the cold night air, the swing rocking slowly, going no higher than a foot or so off the ground.

Luke used to dream of her like that: his Hannah-Banana, five years old and her cheeks pink from laughing, grinning at him and begging for him to push her harder, to let her go higher, higher, higher still, the swing making a perfect arc over the grass before she leapt into the air. In reality, June was always there to catch her, or Moira, or her grandmother; in his dreams, Hannah only floated away like a balloon caught in a breeze, disappearing from his reach and his sight until she was too far gone, only a speck in the distance he couldn’t grasp or follow.

It is overwhelming, comprehending the gravity of what his daughter was put through in their years apart, the true weight of everything in her life that he missed; it is overwhelming, having her here before him, tangible and solid and _real_.

“I thought about you every day,” he says without thinking, and Agnes slows to a jerky stop, a soft cloud of snow and dirt puffing up where the heels of her shoes drag along the ground. Her hands curl tighter around the cold chains, her posture rigid. Luke grasps at the chains to steady them and he can’t stop himself, he can’t help it, and _fuck_ what the therapist said about _time_ and _emotional distance_ and fucking _healing from long-term trauma_ , fuck it, _fuck it_ , his whole fucking _life_ has been filled with long-term fucking _trauma_ : “I need you to – I _never_ forgot about you, I need you to know that. You were my _baby_ , and it _killed me_ , Han, just – I loved you _so much_ , it tore me up inside that I couldn’t be there for you. That I couldn’t _protect_ you.”

His voice cracks and Agnes doesn’t answer, Agnes doesn’t look at him. Agnes keeps herself stiff and still, poised like a bird on a tree branch, ready to take flight at the slightest provocation. Luke presses a palm to his forehead, slides it down over his face; her silence is telling him everything, it’s too much too soon, it’s been too long, he knows it has, he shouldn’t have thought it would be any different than this.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and knuckles away the tears that are threatening to fall, “I know this is – this is a _lot_ , and I shouldn’t put this sh… this _stuff_ on you like this. Hannah. _Agnes_. I’m sorry, Agnes, if this is too much for you. If you – if you’re uncomfortable, we can go back to the house, if you want.”

She’s quiet for a long time, the silence between them filled by the low rumble of distant cars, a plane overhead, a dog barking in someone’s backyard. Agnes turns her head slightly, her face in partial profile beneath the furry hood of her parka as she asks, softly, pointedly, “Did you really love me?”

Luke huffs out a short, strangled laugh at that, his breath curling up into the cold night air. “I loved you from the minute you were born,” he tells her, “I _never stopped_ loving you.”

Agnes lets out a breathy laugh through her nose, then an exhale that sounds like she just might cry. Agnes moves her right hand slowly, carefully, up along the chain so that it is resting just below where Luke’s hand is set, her thumb brushing lightly, deliberately, against the cold heel of his palm. It is such a small gesture, the softest possible touch, but Luke feels it running all the way through him like a full electric current; it feels like certainty, like safety. Like happiness.

“Can we try it again?” she asks, “Can I – can you help me go higher?”

Luke grins down at her and pulls the swing back, ready to let it go. “Anything you want, Agnes. Just say when.”

**Author's Note:**

> A sequel of sorts to _strangers, and other family_ , inspired by my second reread of _The Testaments_. I am so, so _happy_ that in the canon of the books, Luke is alive and one day gets to reunite with his wife and daughter; I am so, so _sad_ that in the canon of the books – and, most likely, the show – Luke will not be seeing June or Hannah for a long, long time.


End file.
